#existentialism

Where is it I've read that someone condemned to death says or thinks, an hour before his death, that if he had to live on some high rock, on such a narrow ledge that he'd only room to stand, and the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, everlasting tempest around him, if he had to remain standing on a square yard of space all his life, a thousand years, eternity, it were better to live so than to die at once! Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be! ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#meaning-of-life #philosophy-literature #death

Il n'y a de réalité que dans l'action. (There is no reality except in action.) ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#existentialism #handeln #inspirational #philosophy #reality

Life’s easy. It’s living it that’s difficult. ↗

— Mike Sasso

#insightful #inspirational #life #oblique #obvious

Today, however, we are having a hard time living because we are so bent on outwitting death. ↗

— Simone de Beauvoir

#existentialism #death

Me parece que de nada vale correr si siempre ha de irse por el mismo camino, cerrado, de nuestra personalidad. Unos seres nacen para vivir, otros para trabajar, y otros para mirar la vida. Yo tenia un pequeño y ruin papel de espectadora. Imposible salirme de él. Imposible libertarme. Una tremenda congoje fue para mí lo único real en aquellos momentos. ↗

— Carmen Laforet

#coming-of-age #existentialism #laforet #nada #spanish-civil-war

Integrity is unity of the personality; it implies being brutally honest with ourselves about our intentionality. Since intentionality is inextricably bound up with the daimonic, this is never an easy, nor always pleasant pursuit. But being willing to admit our daimonic tendencies - to know them consciously and to wisely oversee them - brings with it the invaluable blessing of freedom, vigor, inner strength, and self-acceptance. ↗

— Stephen A. Diamond

#existentialism #anger

[in the true mad north] of introspection, where 'falcons of the inner eye' dive and die, glimpsing in their dying fall, all life's memory of existence. ↗

— Lawrence Ferlinghetti

#artist #beatnik #emptiness #existentialism #art

Artistic symbols and myths speak out of the primordial, preconscious realm of the mind which is powerful and chaotic. Both symbol and myth are ways of bringing order and form into this chaos. ↗

— Rollo May

#existentialism #myth #symbol #art

But how can we venture to reprove or praise the universe! Let us beware of attributing to it heartlessness and unreason or their opposites: it is neither perfect nor beautiful nor noble, and has no desire to become any of these; it is by no means striving to imitate mankind! It is quite impervious to all our aesthetic and moral judgements! It has likewise no impulse to self-preservation or impulses of any kind; neither doe sit know any laws. Let us beware of saying there are laws in nature. There are only necessities: there is no one to command, no one to obey, no one to transgress... ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#universe #beauty

All creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought. ↗

— David Eagleman

#death #existentialism #human-nature #life #love